Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration: A Guide for Campus Leaders (review)
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If collaboration is such a good idea, why does it seem to be the exception, rather than the rule in higher education? In Organizing Higher Education for Collaboration: A Guide for Campus Leaders, Adrianna Kezar and Jaime Lester answer this perplexing question by presenting findings from their empirical research, centering on campuses that create environments to support collaborative work. The authors reveal partnership possibilities, obstacles, and windfalls, and posit that genuine collaboration requires urgent action, new organizational structures, and the reallocation of campus resources. Their keen insights and practical advice are timely, given the economic uncertainty and dwindling resources that often breed competition instead of collaboration in American higher education.
The book includes three parts. Part 1 summarizes the ways higher education has historically operated and reveals the paradoxes inherent in collaboration practices. The authors, based on a thorough review of the literature as well as their own research, conclude that not-so-nimble American colleges discourage collaboration because of their entangled bureaucracies, antiquated reward structures, isolation practices, and deep-seated allegiance to rugged individualism.
This section concludes with an uplifting case study of Collaborative University, which reminds readers that collaboration is alive and well (at least on one pseudonymous campus). Noteworthy aspects of this introductory section are the integrated and interdisciplinary review of the literature and the in-depth case study, both of which include numerous and diverse collaboration possibilities including interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary teaching, collaborative pedagogies, academic affair-student affairs partnerships, team-based advising, and cross-functional assessment.
Part 2, the heart of the book, quotes from the provost of a large comprehensive university: “The problem is that we keep trying to force collaborative innovations into a structure and culture that supports individual work” (p. 59). This section proposes ways to change institutional contexts (i.e., structures and environments) by identifying systematic threats to collaboration and then introducing specific strategies for reorganizing the academy to be more responsive. The centerpiece of this section is the authors’ presentation of seven key features of organizational context: (a) mission/vision/educational philosophy, (b) values, (c) networking, (d) integrating structures (e.g., team-based work), (e) rewards, (f) external pressures, and (g) learning. Kezar and Lester argue that administrators, faculty, and students must recognize and address these seven features of organizational context to change the pervasive ethos of individualism that currently trumps collaboration.
Yes, the authors have rounded up the usual suspects—a collection of “structural, process, human, political, and cultural elements” (p. 60)—that change agents must interrogate at the outset to solve crimes against collaboration. Yet a closer investigation of content contained in these seven chapters reveals numerous subtle and important contributions to knowledge. Each chapter carefully defines key concepts, makes clear the importance of these concepts, situates the concepts in existing discourses, and warns of likely challenges.
The concluding segment in each of these seven chapters includes a useful checklist of seminal arguments. Collectively, the authors remind readers to attend to the proverbial forest (i.e., the gestalt of the seven context features), as well as the trees (i.e., the seven features considered individually). The plentiful, diverse, and specific case study examples illuminate the value of this holistic [End Page 606] approach to achieving collaboration. In total, this section offers comprehensive and sensible approaches to altering a campus ethos, which is a welcome alternative to more popular piecemeal and superficial strategies.
Part 3, the conclusion, includes a comprehensive stage model of collaboration in higher education that integrates the advice offered in the previous two sections. Chapter 11 includes a model that reveals how various elements of organizational context could “unfold over time to create an environment for collaborative work” (p. 213). This three-stage model advocates: (a) building a commitment to collaboration, (b) committing to collaboration, and (c) sustaining collaboration. The model reveals how select universities have morphed into collaborative contexts by adopting and adapting this three-phase process.
Chapter 12 suggests how...
